Wireless communications have become pervasive in recent years. At first, telecommunications provided cordless handsets to enable consumers to use a home telephone without being restricted by a telephone cord. Mobile telephones further provided freedom to consumers by enabling them to use a telephone while away from home. Finally, computers that were once attached to a wall socket to communicate over the Internet became wireless through the use of wireless routers and other wireless access points.
While wireless routers have enabled computer users to access the Internet with unprecedented freedom, bandwidth of these routers are relatively slow. Today's technology provides users with 50 megabit (MB) per second communications. However, these speeds are relatively slow when downloading large amounts of content, such as a movie.
A number of bandwidth expansion products have been developed to increase bandwidth to subscribers. One such product provides a subscriber with a device to aggregate bandwidth from local wireless routers. Essentially, communication with each local wireless router is performed in parallel.
One situation that has developed by wireless routers becoming so pervasive is non-subscribers accessing wireless routers and services being paid by neighbors. This situation arises when a subscriber does not password protect access to the wireless router. In the case of a non-subscriber accessing a subscriber's wireless router, this act is considered theft of wireless communications services. In the case where the subscriber knowingly allows for other non-subscribers to access the wireless router, such an act is generally prohibited by the service agreement between the service provider and the subscriber. The act of bandwidth pooling by non-resellers, such as residential consumers, is also generally considered a violation of the service agreement because non-subscribers or users other than the subscriber who owns the wireless router are provided access to the wireless routers and telecommunications services without paying a telecommunications carrier.